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Chocolate Frosting
2 squares unsweetened chocolate 2 T butter 1 C sugar 1/2 C milk 1 t vanilla extract 1 t lemon extract Melt chocolate in saucepan, add sugar, milk and butter and cook until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water. Add flavoring, beat until right consistency to spread.
Ruby Williams. 1 C powdered sugar 2 T cocoa (heaping)
A cooked fudge-style frosting: essentially a small batch of chocolate fudge poured at the right moment. The sugar stage is the whole recipe, and everything else is detail.
- Soft ball means 234-240F"Tried in cold water" is the old test: a drop of syrup pressed between the fingers under cold water forms a ball that slumps when released. A candy thermometer reading 234-240F is the same point and far more reliable.
- Squares of chocolateA square of unsweetened baking chocolate is 1 oz, so this calls for 2 oz total. Modern bars are often scored into half-ounce sections rather than the old one-ounce squares; weigh rather than count.
- Stir before the boil, not afterDissolve the sugar completely while the mixture heats, then leave it alone. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystals and turns the finished frosting grainy.
- When to beatLet the pan cool to about 110F before beating, off the heat. Beaten while still hot, the mixture is likely to set coarse and grainy; beaten warm, it thickens to a spreadable fudge in a minute or two.
- Both extractsThe teaspoon of lemon extract alongside the vanilla is not necessarily an error; at this quantity it reads as brightness rather than lemon flavour. Leave it out if you want a plain chocolate frosting.
- If it stiffens too soonBeat in a teaspoon of hot milk or cream at a time until it moves again. A frosting that has gone past spreading can be reheated gently with a spoonful of milk and re-cooled.
- The two lines at the end"1 C powdered sugar, 2 T cocoa (heaping)" belongs to a different, uncooked frosting and has no method attached in the original. It is not part of Ruby Williams's recipe; ignore it or treat it as the beginning of a lost second entry.
- YieldRoughly 1 cup, enough to top a single 8-inch layer. Double it for a two-layer cake.
Community cookbooks compiled by church societies -- sold to raise money for a building fund, an organ, or the missionary board -- are among the best records we have of what ordinary American households actually cooked, precisely because each recipe carries a neighbour's name. Frostings like this one sit at a transitional moment: cooked sugar-syrup icings, worked out in the same tradition as fudge and penuche, were long standard, while the uncooked confectioners' sugar frostings that would displace them appear on the very same pages, as the orphaned line at the end of this entry shows. Unsweetened baking chocolate was the default chocolate of the American kitchen well into the twentieth century, sold in one-ounce squares and used for everything from cake to cocoa; cocoa powder, cheaper and shelf-stable, was steadily taking its place in exactly the sort of quick frosting that the trailing fragment describes.